Any football player receiving a call from Russell Gurr or Alastair McLae in 2025 could be in for a truly unexpected adventure. However, every year brings new opportunities in the field of football.
The International Football Consultancy is run by Gurr and McLae, who collaborate with them to provide scouting and recruitment services to international clubs and national federations.
That includes overseeing Samoa, Fiji, and the Cook Islands’ heritage scouting efforts for some of the world’s most remote footballing nations.
They connect players with the relevant football association and use artificial intelligence technology to identify players with qualifying ancestry.
Essentially, they are international football matchmakers.
They have frequently found players who live thousands of miles away and are unable to identify their country of origin.
As developing football nations, especially as they try to become more competitive, their work has become well-known and developed.
Jess Ibrom, the head coach of Samoa and former Cook Islands captain, can attest that he has worked with Gurr and McLae both in and before.
“It’s a way of bridging the gap to the nations above us”, England-born Ibrom tells BBC Sport.
Gurr, working remotely from Scotland, and New Zealand-based McLae kick-start conversations between players and federations which have led to several senior international breakthroughs.
Gurr’s experience includes time spent as a coach, scout, and video analyst – but it was a volunteering role for the Football Federation of Samoa, aiding the nation of just 200, 000 people in its search for players, which kindled his current venture.
“We’re trying to grow this and help as many nations as we can”, says Gurr.
“With Samoa, from 2021 to 2023 we found over 350 players. We found players in the Manchester City academy that are eligible, players in Spain, Qatar, China, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia.
” You wouldn’t believe where they are. “
Gurr estimates that from the players identified as eligible for Samoa, across all age groups in men’s and women’s football, about 60 debuts have so far been recorded.
Their work with the Cook Islands, a nation of just 10, 000 people, has identified 50 players and led to 10 debuts in just one year.
Ibrom, the nation’s coach, said: “When Alastair reached out to me in 2021, it opened a conversation about what strategy we could develop in Samoa to improve player identification. Last year, the nation led the country to back-to-back World Cup qualifying victories for the first time.
Conversations can be facilitated by Alastair and Russ once they are identified, or it can be as straightforward as a cold call, as recently as this week I received a message from a potential American player.
So, how do they do it?
Through their extensive database, Gurr and McLae can look for potential candidates and find out which nations a player might be eligible for. This is done by Gurr and McLae, who created their own AI heritage scouting system.
Their reputation in the sport has grown to the point where they even assisted the well-known video game Football Manager in updating its own database in the countries they pair operate in, combined with their own research team’s time-tested, traditional scouting methods.
” About 50% of the players don’t know they are even eligible, “says Gurr.
There is no one way to approach it; what the federation wants and how they want to run. For example, with Samoa, because a big part of our focus was on youth players, we could go public and do a lot of work in communities.
“If you’re after a professional player, you probably want things to be a bit more discreet. We can do both. We’re speaking with bigger nations at the moment.
Pharrell Trainor, a teenager at Australian club Newcastle Jets, is one such success story.
The 18-year-old, who now plays his club football in Germany, has since progressed through Samoa’s youth sides before breaking into the senior squad for last year’s World Cup qualifying campaign.
The work of Gurr and McLae has had an impact at all levels, despite the Samoa men’s team’s nine-year dominance in the Fifa rankings in 2024.
For the first time in history that a woman’s team has qualified for the Under-17 tournament in Morocco later this year, 10 players have been chosen. This is the first time Samoa has ever advanced to a Fifa World Cup competition of any level.
Their most recent partnership with Fiji has so far connected them to players in England, the United States, Germany and Australia.
It is anticipated that the formation of federations in Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean will soon yield additional success stories as smaller nations are eager to explore these avenues.
” We’ve had a really good reaction because we don’t push a pathway to anyone. We purely tell them they’re eligible and inform the federation that this player is eligible, “Gurr explains.
The federation has the option of choosing the player if they want to proceed that route, and the player can choose them.
“The players are really excited to have that pathway open up to them a lot of the time,” he said.
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